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Comment by mhaberl | Hacker News Reader

Godot has a lot going for it. Standing in its way was the wide adoption of Unity. I feel that the merger with ironSource maybe removed that hurdle.

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Not sure why you have been downvoted as I have seen a lot of that sentiment on twitter and youtube already.

I do not believe that this ironSource thing or the comments from the CEO will cause a real downfall of Unity but I do believe that VR is the area where Godot has the chance to sidestep the huge lead of Unity and shine as a real competitor.

Because the technology is still changing very rapidly and no one has too big a lead on others (especially with standalone headsets).

Godot even had support for Oculus hand tracking in late 2019 when it was not officially released for Unity and Unreal.

At the moment everyone manufacturer is building for Unity first and everything else second (if at all), but when OpenXR finally has established itself that will be a lot less of a factor

I think it's more likely that Unity will end up in a situation similar to Apple during the period where they messed up the Mac Pro and Macbook Pro - not losing huge sales, but the creative trendsetters that used to be their biggest evangelists will start looking for alternatives.

The Unity situation is definitely weird and Unity basically introduced a lot of FUD about itself. I know a lot of indies are worried about things like Unity pushing microtransactions on all developers. I think I would be worried even if I was the developer of one of those huge microtransaction games. Unity has probably seen how much money Apple and Google are making from their cut of microtransactions while Unity itself is only making money from the engine seat licensing (at least that’s my understanding. I don’t believe Unity collects royalties). I wouldn’t be surprised if Unity tries to change licensing for future versions of the engine to try to get it’s own slice of the microtransaction money.

Being part of "the German Godot Discord" Server and skimming through the Godot subreddit from time to time. Yes, yes it helped. Several people are asking for advice on how to make the switch.

How can I find and join this Discord server?

It's a cliché at this point, but 4.0 (or more realistically, 4.1/4.2) would be the milestone that would result in professional adoption of Godot. 3D is still at indie-level now, and requires a lot of workarounds and hacks for some advanced stuff.

There is lots of truth behind the cliche. I've been trying out it's features the whole time alpha version's been out, and it's on a different level both in terms of usability and performance. Keeping in mind of course that alphas can be quite unstable and require you to untangle yourself every now and then. I'd advise most to wait atleast until beta

Yeah, another 4 alpha user, here. There were a few regressions while developing in Alpha, but 4 is shaping up to be really good.

Even if you don’t go for godot as your main engine, the speed with which you can prototype is really nice.

I've already seen some Unity expats in a game dev discord I'm part of, starting to pick up Godot. It's not just the ironSource merge, the CEO has made their focus ad-tech and monetization, whilst the game engine itself is still grappling with split focus issues and playing catch-up with Unreal. It's hard not to see that as a creative indie-dev and conclude that you're probably not the target market for the engine anymore.

It hardly can be considered for a serious commercial project without having a engine team already. But for hobbyist it might become a good choice and the popularity definitly helps.

Might be a nitpick, but there’s also the problem of what exactly we are calling a “serious commercial project”.

Right now the most successful game made with Godot Engine is Cruelty Squad (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/). Regardless of if you would call it “professional” or not, it was one of the most noted indie games of 2021, had great reviews, and probably was much more commercially successful than your average Unity/Unreal “professional” indie title (given how so many of them flop). Same goes for some highly successful RPG Maker games, which usually people would not call it a “commercial-quality” engine.

I think there’s a lesson here: don’t care that much if you’re using a “commercial” quality engine or not, just care if the engine will give the right tools to make the game that you envision.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1249480/ExZodiac/

Here's an absolutely beautiful commercial game made in Godot.

miziziziz's wrought flesh has some great devlogs on the godot journey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpFgdvG_WmI

There are still people out there rolling their own engines for commercial projects, it's all about what you can pull off with the tools you've chosen. But I would agree that there's a professional network and support system around Unity that Godot currently doesn't have. If you're planning to hire a team, it'd be much easier to find good Unity developers than Godot devs.

The Sonic Colors PC port is also running on Godot Engine.

sonic fans have mostly decided that was a bad port, saying that might do more damage than good

To be fair, Sonic fans don't like any Sonic games that have been released in the last 20 years.

Many of us consider _Sonic Mania (2017)_ to be the best sonic game ever made.

Some of the most egregious issues turned out to be because people on Twitter were not disclosing that they were running a brand new Switch game in an emulator.

But even aside from that, I'd argue Godot probably had little to do with the quality of the port. There's ample evidence that you can make buggy games with any engine, and the Sonic franchise in particular seems to have a long running problem with SEGA pushing releases out half-baked.

What I'd see as a more of an obstacle is the lack of an asset store. Unity asset store has tons of stuff in it for very cheap and it's integrated straight into unity

There is an official asset library that only allows (F)OSS licensed stuff, and there are third party stores (but I don't know which is the best/most successful).

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